In a typical sales environment, a buyer contacts (e.g., via the Internet, an intranet, extranet, world wide web, etc.) a goods or service provider (hereafter seller) seeking goods (e.g., hardware or software sales) or services (e.g., technical support or repairs). Even though the buyer usually has a general understanding of what the buyer wishes to purchase, sellers must still engage in often-lengthy dialogs with the buyer to validate the intended purchase, as well as to determine other goods or services that might be of interest to the buyer. As used herein and the claims that follow, the term “software” is intended to include software installed within hardware such as non-volatile memory, as well as within mass storage devices such as hard disks.
Such dialogues with the buyer are expensive in time and resources since the seller must provide people with whom the buyers interact. These expenses necessarily impact the prices at which the seller may provide the goods and services. In an effort to minimize these costs, sellers have developed various techniques for speeding up the sales process, and therefore minimizing the amount of time required for an operator to aid a buyer. Speeding up time spent with the buyer allows the seller to amortize the seller's fixed costs (e.g., salary, rent, etc. for the agents) across multiple buyers. One obvious improvement has been to computerize the sales process, and allow a seller to search online databases of the seller's products. Another improvement has been to provide cross-references in the database between the buyer's intended purchase and other related purchases, allowing the seller to suggest purchasing the related products. Other improvements have been made as well.
But, one element remaining in these improvements is the presence of a human operator with which the buyer interacts. Thus, even though techniques may be applied to distribute operator-related fixed costs among multiple buyers, the fixed costs have not been avoided.
A related problem is that when a buyer seeks to repair a computing device that fails a test, such as a power-on self-test (POST), it can be particularly difficult to identify computing device components (e.g., installed goods) requiring repair or replacement if the computing device cannot be brought to some minimal functionality. In such circumstances, it would be beneficial to arrange for such replacement during execution of the test itself.